📷 The Land of High Mountains: Pakistan.Day 16. From Gilgit to Isla...

So, now is the morning before flying from Gilgit to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan with an international airport. Soon we will be there, and in a few hours we will board the second flight, the plane that will take us home. Only now we have managed to check in for a flight from Islamabad to home. We are already in anticipation, it is only a couple of hours to fly to the city.

We had breakfast and went to the airport, which, it turns out, does not work around the clock: we arrived and waited in front of closed doors together with other passengers — they will only be opened for boarding the flight. Time is ticking, our departure should be in half an hour, at 9:30 am, and we are still not allowed to the airport. The guard smokes inside in the corner at the entrance and throws the ashes into a flower pot. We are waiting and a little nervous.

A little more time passed, and we found out a very unpleasant thing: due to bad weather, our flight was canceled today. Not postponed for a couple of hours, but simply canceled immediately, although we do not see signs of any particularly bad weather — but the pilots, apparently, know better.

To Islamabad at least 12 hours by car, and our departure from there is in 10 and a half hours. All nightly attempts to check in for the flight turned out to be a waste of time and nerves, we do not understand what to do now, we sit and wait for something. All the locals quietly left after the news was announced — no scandals, no shouts, only we were left near the airport. It turns out that this is not an uncommon phenomenon here, and the Pakistanis are already used to it: if they do not fly today, they will fly tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow — when the weather allows. French twin-engine ATR 42 aircraft are used at the Gilgit airport, but we will definitely not get on them today.

"To the hotel?" — asks us our driver Amin, who was going to go to Karimabad today, but returned from the road back to the airport for us. "To Islamabad!" — Dima answers.

Well, instead of a two-hour flight, we are going to Islamabad in a minibus with our immortal imperturbable driver-racer Amin. Well, what else can you call a person who starts overtaking, drives into the oncoming lane and, like in thrillers, rides head-on to another minibus? The oncoming driver's nerves give way and he swerves to the side of the road. It seems our adventure continues! :)

Offline maps application Maps.me promises 10 hours of driving, Wikipedia — 15 hours, Amin — 16 hours. We left at 11:11. Let's see who is right. If we suddenly get there in 10 hours, then maybe we can still catch our flight home ... That would be good.

Men are squatting along the roadside. Sometimes they gather in flocks and cheerfully discuss the latest news. The elections have just been held, and political life in Pakistan is in full swing. People are very friendly, they react joyfully when you greet them. Even from the car you wave your hand — they smiles and waves back.

All the way we saw tractors of this brand - Massey Ferguson. Their red color and cheerful drivers, as well as the obligatory elements of decoration, even just flowers on the exhaust pipe, always raise the mood.

Gasoline here, by the way, costs 113 rupees per liter (this price was relevant for July 2019). We will go for about 550-600 kilometers. Well, let's get comfortable.

Hell, sometimes it seems to me that our minibus is getting very thin, and we all shrink imperceptibly in it. I cannot give any other explanation for the fact that on this mountain serpentine (two-lane road without roadsides) three cars are simultaneously placed along the entire width of the road: ours, the one we are overtaking, and the oncoming car.

I also wonder why only Pakistani or Indian music is played in Pakistani cafes and cars? Why no driver has the Beatles, Rolling Stone or, at worst, Britney Spears. After all, the Internet is here, can they try to listen to other genres?

The further we go, the worse the road — more and more landslides or mudflows. They are more or less cleared, but still it is impossible to pass quickly.

After the Raikot bridge across the Indus River, from where we rode in jeeps to the foot of Nanga Parbat, we headed towards the unknown — the rest of the Karakoram highway. The road became partly unpaved, the speed has decreased, and we can look at oncoming cars — this one, for example, transports chickens to their further locations.

At one of the police posts, our data is being rewritten again. While we are waiting, a guy in black civilian clothes with a multiply shotgun in his hands gets out of a stopped bus, walks up to the police table, exchanges a few words and disappears again in the bus that is already leaving. Interesting scene.

Dust, constant dust surrounds us on the road, but we are already used to it. We just want to drink and sleep, but we can't sleep — so we will miss the most interesting.

Pedestrian suspension bridges are periodically constructed across the muddy, bubbling Indus River. Goods cross the river like this: the goods are brought along the road from one side by car, people manually carry them over the bridge to the other side and there they load them onto the next car.

If earlier I considered checking documents and rewriting ours passports just as a little annoying thing, now it is downright an obstacle on the way home, and I really want to speed up this slow process.

Before Chilas town, we had to turn left, but we drove further along the Karakorum highway along the Indus River, as a mudflow descended on the shorter highway, so now we definitely do not have time to get to the airport, and we can relax.

But Amin continues to drive forward so that from time to time we even get scared. When Dima says that there is no need to rush in this way, because we still do not have time to arrive by the time of the plane's departure, and askes to go a little slower — Amin replies that this is impossible, cause the speed is in his blood. :)

This is how we go along the serpentines: listening to the whistle of the wind and dodging huge painted colossus trucks.

We left the Gilgit-Baltistan region. The police took our "registration cards", photographed and sent us on with Allah. Along the way, quite often there are police cars with machine guns on the roof (or without them, as in this shot). It becomes interesting why there are so many armed people here?

Clean rivers and streams flow into the Indus, but they get quickly lost in its muddy waters.

Pakistani drivers often overload their trucks. The engineers who developed them would surely be proud, because they can stand it!

There are many terraces on the opposite rocky slope over the Indus River. Here locals have to work very hard to grow at least some kind of crop.

On one of the bends of the road, there is a small village along with a large local cafe or even a restaurant. Amin stops at my mental desire — it smells beautiful and delicious here.

A tandoor was mounted in a large trestle bed, where they immediately began to bake cakes.

Nearby is a small prayer building.

We wait for a long time, and finally they bring us each a plate of festive pilaf with raisins and chicken. Delicious, words can not convey it!

Attention! Below is just a stream of consciousness, my thoughts and observations, which I wrote down in a notebook along the way — almost hourly diary entries. They do not match the photos below that I took at this roadside cafe and next to it while we were waiting for food.

Someone reads my posts, someone looks at photos. Someone is doing this at the same time, so I apologize for the discrepancy between the text and the pictures — I did not take pictures of the road further: it was getting darker every minute, and I simply could not shoot anything good. So I leaned back in the seat of our minibus and just looked with all my eyes at what was happening around me... I want to tell the whole story, and the photos here turned out to be surprisingly interesting — such sketches from the life of a small village on the Karakorum highway. So let's continue :)

18:30. We still have 370 km of the way. We drove 230 kilometers in 7 hours. Terribly slow!

When it got dark, the trucks started to glow, some more like Christmas trees, and some of them only have headlights. And here the big problem of these monsters became clear. I'm used to the fact that the headlights indicate the approximate dimensions of the car, but many Pakistani trucks have them much narrower, and behind a wide cab.

In the villages on the road there is no street lighting, and there are a lot of people walking and sitting on the side of the road. It's pretty scary when the headlights pick out the figures slowly walking almost in the middle of the road from the darkness. People, motorcycles, trucks and very narrow dusty streets. How to ride in this soup?

20:00. There are 40 minutes left before the departure of our flight from Islamabad, and we still have 325 km to go. Soon it will be possible to wave a hand to the plane in the sky.

We left the next town, it became a little easier. Thin shadows scurry along the roadside — dogs running about their business. Chirping cicadas, finally the coolness of the night. New police posts: "Welcome to the Kohistan region!" The falling asleep policeman takes out a huge book to record our data — we again have a stop. How many more are there for today?

They rewrote our data, but we still stand and wait for something. We ask: "Is everything ok?" "No," says the policeman. - "We are waiting for the security car." Whoa!

We stood a little longer and nevertheless drove on without security, apparently, they looked at us and decided that we would fight off ourselves.

It's not easy to overtake painted trucks at night. They drive slowly down the center of the road, so Amin makes himself felt from afar with a blinking high beam. Those reluctantly move away, and we fit into the gap.
21:00. 295 km left.

After all, the guards sat down with us. Rather, one formidable-looking bearded Pakistani with a weapon. We handed him a bottle of mango juice :) I hope that the next posts will pass faster.

23:46. First, one guard was replaced in our car. Second, now we are definitely given a whole escort car with armed guards — apparently, we entered an unsafe area. The most interesting thing is that no one asked to accompany or protect us — this is a completely independent decision of the local police. 226 km left to Islamabad.

1:28. 183 km left.
The security car remained at the next post, we drove on. A few minutes later, a new security car is driving in front of us. In the cockpit there is a driver and an armed policeman.

Many cars on the road drive with high beams and do not even think to turn them off when Amin blinks. Here he is, the real Iron Man — our company has been sleeping for a long time or, like me, is constantly falling asleep, and he has been driving for so many hours in a crazy race along mountain serpentines.

3:00. Escort cars change every 15-20 minutes. There are already good wide roads, the city of Abbottabad is soon. The police show the driver to follow them exactly. In 3 minutes — a new car, we are escorted very professionally.In the back of each such car there are usually 1-2 police officers armed with machine guns. The cars are also painted to the taste of the driver. Somewhere there is an inscription "Commando", somewhere "Elite force", "KPK police" or just two pistols and a knife in the middle.

Everything is great, but then a small overlap happens — in the place of the new change of the escort car, we see police officers running to their car along the side of the road, who did not have time to prepare for our arrival. But they turn around, catch up and overtake us, and we drove on. 107 km left.

At 3:30, another change. Siren sounds mingle with Pakistani music, the honking of trucks giving way and the rattling of the car body. Hellish cacaphony, which, coupled with interest and excitement, does not let me fall asleep. 96 km left.

At 3:40 am we are on an already paid high-speed, completely dark and almost deserted highway. It seems that the escort left us somewhere on it, not far from the airport.

4:40 — 10 km to the airport. We went in the wrong direction, and now we have another 26 km. It turns out that there used to be another airport in Islamabad, and the driver, according to old memory, took us there.

At 5:20 am we are at the international airport. The sun rises in the distance, and we are wildly sleepy. Moving from Gilgit to the airport in Islamabad cost us 4,500 rupees per person. 18 hours of driving is over, now it remains to buy tickets for the plane that will take us home. A bit sorry for the aimlessly missing tickets — our flight departed without us, this happened to me for the first time. The prices for tickets for flights to Moscow, which leave in a few hours, are expensive — it is not cheap to buy right before departure.

Well, this is a lesson for us for the future: where it is planned to first fly by domestic flight (especially in the highlands), and only then fly by international flight, it is worth making a reserve day or more between these flights, and not several hours. You never know what's wrong with the weather.

Well, the common journey is over, everyone, one way or another, is flying home. But Olya and I have unfinished thing here — we have not yet drunk Pina Colada, which we have repeatedly wanted so badly during this trip ... Well, it seems that we can still fix it right here, in Pakistan!

To be continued...

Parts of the journey:

Camera: OLYMPUS E-M1 Mark II

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You can also see my photos in my blog LJ and in my profile on NatGeo

📷 The Land of High Mountains: Pakistan.Day 16. From Gilgit to Islamabad along the Karakoram Highway